Free Republic

An elite group of Ukrainian drone operators is hunting Russians from desert dugouts across Africa, as Kyiv wages a proxy war to bleed strongman Vladimir Putin’s global army. Moscow has deployed about 5,000 troops across Mali, Sudan and Libya to back coup-installed military dictatorships and warlords since 2020 — as Putin has tried to fill the void left by Western forces’ withdrawal and assert himself as a power player — often in exchange for lucrative mining rights. And Ukraine has worked alongside local rebels to fight off those same Russians forces in an effort to forge new alliances against Moscow....

While most war crimes committed by Serb forces during the Balkan wars are being investigated and made public knowledge, the role played by Russian mercenaries kontraktniki [contract soldiers] deserves more attention. Many Russian citizens voluntarily fought in the Balkans for the government of Serbian President Slobodan Miloševiæ, committing a range of crimes along the way including mass murder, assault and battery, rape, robbery, and theft. Most, if not all, of these Russian kontraktniki war criminals have gone unidentified by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague – hence, so far, unpunished. As the Miloševiæ trial...

Several Malian soldiers were killed in the jihadist ambush on Thursday of an army convoy heading for Niger, in the Ménaka region (northeast), a military official and a local elected official said on Friday..."We can speak of about twenty people if we count the dead, wounded and missing Malian soldiers" , said the local elected official, stressing that the balance sheet is "not yet very clear".Both spoke on condition of anonymity in the absence of official communication from the authorities.The elected official reported that the Malian army and paramilitaries from the Russian security group Wagner were deployed in the area....

Footage of Prigozhin shows how the slain leader predicted Ukraine's shock offensive. THE slain chief of the notorious Wagner mercenary group predicted Russia would come under siege from Ukraine before Vlad had him killed. Warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin died when his plane was blown out of the sky in August 2023, allegedly on Putin's orders. He led the private Russian military unit that was called in to assist the Kremlin's quest to illegally conquer Ukraine and became increasingly frustrated with how war efforts were organised. Fed up with the Ministry of Defence, Prigozhin eventually threatened a coup against Moscow - a...